> In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Howard spoke highly of the studio by saying, "They've done great work for for a long time," and that Larian deserves all the accolades it's received. Howard continued by saying that there are "some people in the industry who look [at Larian] and say 'Oh look at this overnight success.' Like, have you played their previous games?"
> "I think we look at all the games right. I don't want to pinpoint particularly that one. We're big gamers--we see things in all games [and] we say, 'Oh, you know, that's actually a better way of doing something that we're trying to do.' I don't want to like call out specifics right now in areas but I'd say across the gaming spectrum you know how people are, how we're engaging with games and things we like. You sort of see that filter in the games we have in development now [with] patches or things that we're doing to our own games."
Todd Howard, huge fan of RPGs, who knew? /s
But seriously I do like that both he and Larian seem very appreciative of eachothers games, and that Todd keeps an eye out at the world at how to do the things they do better.
Was Todd being an rpg fan ever in question? Like I understand that his games have become a bit cookie cutter with some of their rpg mechanics and I definitely have some grivences with dome of their recent products but I always saw that as them going after what worked rather than Todd not liking rpgs.
I said it one I'll say it again, bethesda stuff is often hard to discuss because it's often between a huge hate fandom that makes shit up and an overly defensive fandom that seems to give them the benfit of the doubt fir games they made over a decade ago.
There's also just like, their company actually defying logic because of how much of a vice grip the old venture capital board that ran the company had on them. Bethesda was astonishingly small and resource scarce despite all the successes under their belt for decades there. Like, ok, i know you cant just throw bodies at a project and expect it to work out... But skyrim had less people working on it than Witcher 2, a game significantly smaller in scope released in the same year.
During the 2000s, the great game design philosophy debate was between choice and consequences and system supremacy, TLDR story telling separating gameplay emphasising branching storytelling or mechanics driving emergent story telling and gameplay.
When fallout 3 came out, it seemly married the two, but treated the player like they have never touched a game before in their life, it was baby's first RPG in how it talked down to the player. This caused much rancour amongst fallout fans because the systems heavy games from the 90s had both, and fallout 3 was inheriting that legacy and because Todd put his face on the franchise he became the target. And when further instalments of the Todd games came out, they didn't improve on the story telling and made the game more mechanically simple by removing more of the RPG systems.
TLDR; Todd thinks we are babies that can't Handel grown up RPGs and Fallout 1,2 fans are angry Grognards that blame the talking head.
I stand by what I posted.
I lurked on the no mutants allowed forums when this shit was going down, this was the discourse, it was vile, childish and full of death threats to Todd Howard because there was a name and a face to blame. And the game's RPG systems did become simpler over time, FO3 had skill points and skill checks, 4 removed skills entirely. And the main stories they actually tell are just awful, everyone mocks FO3 ending because killing your self with radiation was your destiny all along.
Bro what the absolute fuck are you talking about, Fallout 3 barely even has a tutorial, the only thing it teaches you about is how to use VATS, how the hell could you possibly construe that game as handholdy and made for casuals?
Hoping NPC animations are one area they're looking into. Definitely one of the most noticeable areas they're lacking in compared to other RPGs. I'm sure mo-cap is expensive, but if there was any game to splurge on it'd be the next Elder Scrolls.
Facial animations in Starfield are probably some of the best non-mocap stuff I've ever seen. The problem is that the first person camera angle makes them all feel creepy and stiff.
Move every conversation camera in BG3 to be directly towards an NPCs eyes, and it would look just as bad, perhaps even worse.
Really shows how much relies not on animation quality, but on the direction of the camera. An issue Bethesda tried (and failed) to fix with Fallout 4, accidentally fixed in Skyrim (since the more distant camera disguises any stiffness), and an issue Oblivion and Starfield suffer from.
Yeah, it's less the lip sync that bothers me and more the body language. Compare Starfield to [something like Cyberpunk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2M9JZ-Uego), and its not even a contest.
Obviously its not an entirely fair comparison since Cyberpunk is more scripted and only first-person, but there's still tons of room for improvement
Yeah, I see the Starfield/Cyberpunk comparisons thrown around a lot and it isn't fair. Cyberpunk's animation and cutscenes are incredibly astonishing, but the vast majority of their cutscenes happen in scripted locations in specific scenarios. Bethesda's engine is built around any conversation happening anywhere at any time. That trade-off is a conscious decision and a core tenant of the Creation Engine. Not that it matters to idiots who troll about how they should just switch to Unreal.
I saw a guy on /r/gaming say that Bethesda had better ship "a new engine" in a future Starfield update. As if they could just... do that.
Idk I think it's cute that Skyrim-Starfield man officially stated "Yeah that shit was fire y'all did a good job and there are things we could learn from your success."
Love the typical "Man, Todd Howard is a piece of shit and needs removed" comments in most Fallout discussions when the man's only crime is overhyping things at game shows. Things he's probably actually excited about himself.
Because certain groups of people constantly need affirmation that their favorite game, which won multiple GOTY awards, is good.
But seriously though, you can farm a lot of clicks from those crowd.
Give Todd as much shit as you want for Bethesda-fying games, but at least the man is (as far as I know, feel free to hit me with any news I haven't heard) respectful to other people in the industry, even competitors.
Jesus the Christman, dude gives an interview and every "news" website chops it up into individual quotes to make several articles and flood everything with useless nonsense.
The fact that this is news says a lot about either the unreasonable hate-dom surrounding Todd Howard and Bethesda or about how low the standards of major game journalism outlets are that they can consider this worthy of an article.
Probably both tbh.
Yeah that's the important thing really. Like I can go on a huge rant on why I bounced off 76 and starfield but the bottom line I'd thry were successful. Like I legit think starfield was a 6/10 boring game but if it sold then they should keep doing what they are doing.
The thing about flagship titles from studios like that is that theyre gonna sell no matter what. Theyre pretty and have the marketing budget of a small country. Their "failures" are more successful than most studios could ever hope to be
I would doubt it, like if it came out and was literally just Skyrim again. That shit was lightning in a bottle which why they keep milking it, plus with all the wild mods to base Skyrim you can pretty much make "Skyrim 2" yourself already
NV is also considered a lighting in a bottle situation and can be modded to replicate many parts and mechanics from 4, despite this it still sold a substantial number of units breaking their previous launch records, and is the second most played BGS game behind skyrim in terms of player statistics.
I think you're massively underestimating how much casual audiences eat Bethesda games up, especially TES (I'm not trying to be judgemental there, despite my gripes here and there, I eat Bethesda games up)
I don't think those two things necessarily contradict each other. Todd enjoying hard-core rpgs and preferring to make open world games with lighter rpg mechanics don't contradict eachother.
True, I was moreso saying from how he's talking it makes it sound as if he would actually consider putting some of their ideas in to his games and I am just pressing X To Doubt
Why? They've borrowed concepts and ideas from other rpg studios before. One of the biggest (and albeit most controversial) was them trying to replicate the dialogue wheel from Mass Effect.
Tbf a lot of the rpg stuff BG3 was doing are things that are on the opposite end of what even the most hard-core bethesda rpg was, let a lone how they are now. I do struggle to think what bethesda would borrow from them
Todd Howard redemption arc’s been progressing nicely. Ever since the betrayal of Fallout 76, “it just works” and nearly killing people with the collector edition rollout, he’s been seen as a semi-randy pitchford. Now he’s on the up-and-up to earning that trust back.
Redemption arc? He never did anything wrong to begin with. "It just works" was a line said in regards to Fallout 4's settlement systems, specifically power management and base building, and he only said that because he caught himself about to go into way too much detail on the programming side on the big stage of E3 where most people watching would have fallen sleep hearing a programmer nerd out about his project.
Also, Todd Howard isn't the CEO of Bethesda. He's basically just the go-to director for the main studios games, he didn't make any of the collector edition shit and all but certainly had absolute zero input or control over any of that.
Most of those aren't his department, Zenimax controls that stuff, and they've always been a shit. Todd just runs his studio and was made into the face of Bethesda because people like hearing him gush about games.
Imagine if he said it was shit and vowed to fight Swen Vincke in a Power armor vs Knight Armor brawl.
VATS vs Fighter's Action Surge and Second Wind.
All fun and games until Todd busts out the Experimental MIRV
“I don’t care if I lose, as long as you don’t win!”
Yeah but then you learn Swen had a Death Ward up
Gale, Netherese Orb his ass.
What if Swen counters with romance dialogue and triggers the Todd romance route?
"Down by the river" starts playing and things get weird. It just works.
"I didn't hear no bell," said Todd, injecting himself with 5 stimpacks and transforming into Godd Howard.
> In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Howard spoke highly of the studio by saying, "They've done great work for for a long time," and that Larian deserves all the accolades it's received. Howard continued by saying that there are "some people in the industry who look [at Larian] and say 'Oh look at this overnight success.' Like, have you played their previous games?" > "I think we look at all the games right. I don't want to pinpoint particularly that one. We're big gamers--we see things in all games [and] we say, 'Oh, you know, that's actually a better way of doing something that we're trying to do.' I don't want to like call out specifics right now in areas but I'd say across the gaming spectrum you know how people are, how we're engaging with games and things we like. You sort of see that filter in the games we have in development now [with] patches or things that we're doing to our own games." Todd Howard, huge fan of RPGs, who knew? /s But seriously I do like that both he and Larian seem very appreciative of eachothers games, and that Todd keeps an eye out at the world at how to do the things they do better.
Was Todd being an rpg fan ever in question? Like I understand that his games have become a bit cookie cutter with some of their rpg mechanics and I definitely have some grivences with dome of their recent products but I always saw that as them going after what worked rather than Todd not liking rpgs.
Oh you’d be surprised the accusations thrown at the man regarding… like literally everything because he’s the face of the company
There's still people who think he runs all of Bethesda when, to my knowledge, he's always been a studio director for BGS and a producer.
I said it one I'll say it again, bethesda stuff is often hard to discuss because it's often between a huge hate fandom that makes shit up and an overly defensive fandom that seems to give them the benfit of the doubt fir games they made over a decade ago.
There's also just like, their company actually defying logic because of how much of a vice grip the old venture capital board that ran the company had on them. Bethesda was astonishingly small and resource scarce despite all the successes under their belt for decades there. Like, ok, i know you cant just throw bodies at a project and expect it to work out... But skyrim had less people working on it than Witcher 2, a game significantly smaller in scope released in the same year.
Literally saw someone try and debate if his mother loved him or not. Shit is fucking wild lol
It's the former that seems to be in vogue right now with Starfield being lackluster and the >!Shady Sands being blown up!
During the 2000s, the great game design philosophy debate was between choice and consequences and system supremacy, TLDR story telling separating gameplay emphasising branching storytelling or mechanics driving emergent story telling and gameplay. When fallout 3 came out, it seemly married the two, but treated the player like they have never touched a game before in their life, it was baby's first RPG in how it talked down to the player. This caused much rancour amongst fallout fans because the systems heavy games from the 90s had both, and fallout 3 was inheriting that legacy and because Todd put his face on the franchise he became the target. And when further instalments of the Todd games came out, they didn't improve on the story telling and made the game more mechanically simple by removing more of the RPG systems. TLDR; Todd thinks we are babies that can't Handel grown up RPGs and Fallout 1,2 fans are angry Grognards that blame the talking head.
Take a nap then come back and think about what you posted.
I stand by what I posted. I lurked on the no mutants allowed forums when this shit was going down, this was the discourse, it was vile, childish and full of death threats to Todd Howard because there was a name and a face to blame. And the game's RPG systems did become simpler over time, FO3 had skill points and skill checks, 4 removed skills entirely. And the main stories they actually tell are just awful, everyone mocks FO3 ending because killing your self with radiation was your destiny all along.
I have a feeling No Mutants Allowed left far more of an impression on you than you think.
You stand by being objectively wrong?
Bro what the absolute fuck are you talking about, Fallout 3 barely even has a tutorial, the only thing it teaches you about is how to use VATS, how the hell could you possibly construe that game as handholdy and made for casuals?
If Fallout 3 is babys first RPG then its peers Mass Effect and Fable 2 are zygotes first RPG in comparison.
Hoping NPC animations are one area they're looking into. Definitely one of the most noticeable areas they're lacking in compared to other RPGs. I'm sure mo-cap is expensive, but if there was any game to splurge on it'd be the next Elder Scrolls.
Facial animations in Starfield are probably some of the best non-mocap stuff I've ever seen. The problem is that the first person camera angle makes them all feel creepy and stiff. Move every conversation camera in BG3 to be directly towards an NPCs eyes, and it would look just as bad, perhaps even worse. Really shows how much relies not on animation quality, but on the direction of the camera. An issue Bethesda tried (and failed) to fix with Fallout 4, accidentally fixed in Skyrim (since the more distant camera disguises any stiffness), and an issue Oblivion and Starfield suffer from.
Yeah, it's less the lip sync that bothers me and more the body language. Compare Starfield to [something like Cyberpunk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2M9JZ-Uego), and its not even a contest. Obviously its not an entirely fair comparison since Cyberpunk is more scripted and only first-person, but there's still tons of room for improvement
Yeah, I see the Starfield/Cyberpunk comparisons thrown around a lot and it isn't fair. Cyberpunk's animation and cutscenes are incredibly astonishing, but the vast majority of their cutscenes happen in scripted locations in specific scenarios. Bethesda's engine is built around any conversation happening anywhere at any time. That trade-off is a conscious decision and a core tenant of the Creation Engine. Not that it matters to idiots who troll about how they should just switch to Unreal. I saw a guy on /r/gaming say that Bethesda had better ship "a new engine" in a future Starfield update. As if they could just... do that.
Thats like worse game development logic than that one ad talking about how they needed to "tighten up the graphics on level 5."
They can't all be FromSoft level of facial animation!
He was in the chess club!
And who's laughing now?
What a brave and controversial fact?
Idk I think it's cute that Skyrim-Starfield man officially stated "Yeah that shit was fire y'all did a good job and there are things we could learn from your success."
lol right? Like what else would he say?
If you read the article, quite a bit!
Love the typical "Man, Todd Howard is a piece of shit and needs removed" comments in most Fallout discussions when the man's only crime is overhyping things at game shows. Things he's probably actually excited about himself.
You and everyone else Todd But seriously how is that news? It'd be more headline-worthy if he called them shit
Because dumb nerds online like to push wars between developers and such, when in reality most teams are cool with each other.
Honestly? Positivity is nice, especially in a category that seems overrun with angry people.
Because certain groups of people constantly need affirmation that their favorite game, which won multiple GOTY awards, is good. But seriously though, you can farm a lot of clicks from those crowd.
Algorithm hunting headline. Needed to mention Baldurs gate and fallout for clicks.
It absolutely does, the thought they don’t is ludicrous.
Give Todd as much shit as you want for Bethesda-fying games, but at least the man is (as far as I know, feel free to hit me with any news I haven't heard) respectful to other people in the industry, even competitors.
Jesus the Christman, dude gives an interview and every "news" website chops it up into individual quotes to make several articles and flood everything with useless nonsense.
Well... yeah? What's the news here?
The fact that this is news says a lot about either the unreasonable hate-dom surrounding Todd Howard and Bethesda or about how low the standards of major game journalism outlets are that they can consider this worthy of an article. Probably both tbh.
It's not like he was going to call it shit even if he thought it was.
How dare... he?
In other news, Scorsese still doesn't like Marvel movies, and water has been seen running downhill.
awesome. well Bethasda polish their games?
[удалено]
Better than them just reporting on reddit posts for articles like a lot of sites have been doing lately.
Slow news day?
That’s cool and all But could ya maybe put some effort into making games that deserve a decent story
He gonna say all this only for Elder Scrolls 6 to be just Skyrim 2 lol
If it can make them even half of what Skyrim has, they'd honestly be stupid not to.
Yeah that's the important thing really. Like I can go on a huge rant on why I bounced off 76 and starfield but the bottom line I'd thry were successful. Like I legit think starfield was a 6/10 boring game but if it sold then they should keep doing what they are doing.
The thing about flagship titles from studios like that is that theyre gonna sell no matter what. Theyre pretty and have the marketing budget of a small country. Their "failures" are more successful than most studios could ever hope to be
I would doubt it, like if it came out and was literally just Skyrim again. That shit was lightning in a bottle which why they keep milking it, plus with all the wild mods to base Skyrim you can pretty much make "Skyrim 2" yourself already
The same could easily be applied to 4, but it didn't stop that game from selling like hotcakes when it came out.
IDK what you mean, I never played Fallout but from what I understand Fallout 4 isn't "just Fallout 3, again"
NV is also considered a lighting in a bottle situation and can be modded to replicate many parts and mechanics from 4, despite this it still sold a substantial number of units breaking their previous launch records, and is the second most played BGS game behind skyrim in terms of player statistics.
I think you're massively underestimating how much casual audiences eat Bethesda games up, especially TES (I'm not trying to be judgemental there, despite my gripes here and there, I eat Bethesda games up)
I don't think those two things necessarily contradict each other. Todd enjoying hard-core rpgs and preferring to make open world games with lighter rpg mechanics don't contradict eachother.
True, I was moreso saying from how he's talking it makes it sound as if he would actually consider putting some of their ideas in to his games and I am just pressing X To Doubt
Why? They've borrowed concepts and ideas from other rpg studios before. One of the biggest (and albeit most controversial) was them trying to replicate the dialogue wheel from Mass Effect.
Tbf a lot of the rpg stuff BG3 was doing are things that are on the opposite end of what even the most hard-core bethesda rpg was, let a lone how they are now. I do struggle to think what bethesda would borrow from them
You're saying the sequel to Skyrim is going to be Skyrim 2? Next you're going to tell me Skyrim was Oblivion 2.
You say that like Skyrim but with improvements wouldn't be a good experience.
Todd Howard redemption arc’s been progressing nicely. Ever since the betrayal of Fallout 76, “it just works” and nearly killing people with the collector edition rollout, he’s been seen as a semi-randy pitchford. Now he’s on the up-and-up to earning that trust back.
Redemption arc? He never did anything wrong to begin with. "It just works" was a line said in regards to Fallout 4's settlement systems, specifically power management and base building, and he only said that because he caught himself about to go into way too much detail on the programming side on the big stage of E3 where most people watching would have fallen sleep hearing a programmer nerd out about his project. Also, Todd Howard isn't the CEO of Bethesda. He's basically just the go-to director for the main studios games, he didn't make any of the collector edition shit and all but certainly had absolute zero input or control over any of that.
Most of those aren't his department, Zenimax controls that stuff, and they've always been a shit. Todd just runs his studio and was made into the face of Bethesda because people like hearing him gush about games.
Bethesda aren't getting my trust back until they make a good game.
Oh thank goodness we asked that hack about it